Midnight Sherpa Brings the Spark of Greatness to Life for Sci-Fi Video Game Star Citizen

For the past three years, Midnight Sherpa has worked with the CIG team to concept, design, and animate the cinematic trailer for Invictus—a week-long annual event which serves as a platform to feature new game areas, showcase spacecraft for players to purchase, and for in-game promotions and contests.

The event takes place virtually within the game itself and is held on a different planet each year with a new theme. The concept for this year was the 'Birth of a System', drawn from the expansive in-game lore surrounding the origin story of the solar system which the game takes place. The narrative is an allegorical history of the game’s fictional UEE Navy through the lens of the formation of four planets with varying ecosystems. The frozen, igneous, telluric, and gaseous worlds were visually represented by their respective elemental counterparts: ice, lava, rock, and clouds. The formation of these planets would also build the vignettes which tell the backstory of each world. Heroic battle scenes and displays of military might from the UEE Navy play out to the cinematic footage culminating in an epic finale.

Midnight Sherpa has worked with CIG’s marketing team for the past few years on a wide range of assets including cinematics, in-game content, trailers, social media, and visual collateral for physical events. Working closely with their creative team, Sherpa developed a range of visual styles to truly capture the diversity of the game’s universe and to expand the Star Citizen’s brand to a new generation of players. A deep understanding and adherence to the game’s expansive lore has been a welcome byproduct from the years of collaboration and benefitted Sherpa’s role in developing concepts for CIG and their most ardent fans.

As this piece consists of four different worlds each with a unique look, the Sherpa team designed four distinct visual approaches and methodologies to achieve the style and effects for each chapter. As such, a wide range of tools and approaches were used to capture the thematic range required to tell the story.

Miguel Lee, creative director at Midnight Sherpa Creative, says: “This project was a great melding of design and technology disguised in an epic cinematic trailer. Our team approached the ‘art’ and the ‘science’ with equal weight during the project’s development. Each scene provided a canvas for us to flex our technical virtuosity as a means to tell the story. We’re very proud of the final result and enjoyed the collaborative spirit working with CIG to create this piece.”

Miguel continues: “As huge sci-fi nerds, we can’t help but draw inspiration from the classics when it comes to framing the story, visual composition, and world-building. A little bit Kubrick here and Aronofsky there never hurts to capture the grandeur of the spaces we’re trying to create. We have the added benefit of having incredibly diverse creative backgrounds at Midnight Sherpa as well—we’re a savoury mirepoix of visual communicators, motion designers, illustrators, and entertainment designers all with a penchant for experimentation. Finding new ways to visualise a story and to set it in motion is what excites us most.”